David Cotner: Re Views: 11.2002

David Cotner: Re Views

11.2002

Danny Frankel - The Vibration of Sound (cd by A True Classical CD / Transparency)

These pieces are collaborations with Woody Jackson, Joseph Hammer, Pablo Calogero, Doug Weiselman, and 11 zebra finches. Drone box stands stolidly behind the tablas and bongos as the tape loops around them, wending their insidious ways as startlingly as the diverse selection of ethnic percussion instruments (ocarina, Egyptian tambourine, electric sitar, cuica, etc.). Boy, that mastering at Capitol sure does help. Apparently Mr. Frankel is a percussionist for such modern-day genii as (it says on the sticker) Luscious Jackson and Fiona Apple. I know it pays the rent, but at this point allow me to point my finger skyward and rotate it in a counter-clockwise fashion.

The morphogenetic field effect is such that these recordings hearkens back to the days of ritualistic experimental music (stretching from the Master Musicians of Jajouka up until Sleep Chamber and Psychick T.V. - although it's a bit more upbeat than all that!). This is what can be played to intrigue and captivate your more esoteric belly-dancer girlfriends. It's sweepingly evocative and has a very cinematic, expansive sound to it all. Yet, with the information in the liner notes, is it more tempting to listen to a piece with what instrumentation one might identify and collate, instead of just listening to the piece purely as-is? And now the keening cries of 11 zebra finches speak to the bongos, dumbek, djembe, congra, rattlemallets, metals and Asian chant tape as best they can...

To recap: an album that re-summons one particular spirit of modern exotica.

Address: info@transparency.tv

V/A - Variable Access (cd by Active Suspension)

"Interesting French electronic music" (so the sticker sez) from My Jazzy Child, Shinsei, Aerosol, MILS, Hypo, O.Lamm, Dorine_Muraille, Encre, Osaka, Melodium, and Domitic. I list them all for the various "shout-outs" that should happen in these dopey reviews, as well as to lure you searchers out there on the Internet to find these groups. I'm so thoughtful. The sounds range from tinkly bells and scratching vinyl (My Jazzy Child) to gritty grates of sound so intensely expanded by modern laptop technology; cut-up drumbeats and itchy tingles of sound to pleasant crunchy rhythmic diddlies; to children's voices interspersed amongst a manic landscape and various chirps and singing; to strummed guitar and shivering waves of ambience and foreplay; to dishwashing music that dovetails nicely into the subsequent heartbreaking fuck music.

Ironically, it's somehow remote and removed from other electronic music around these days, if such a thing can be discerned by such dissonant elephantine tones and happy harmonies as appear on this compilation. This is not a bad thing - after all, Jean-Louis Tritignant was in "Funerale en Los Angeles" (aka "The Outside Man", 1972), and he was the outside man, and he was badass. Look for Frog-Rock (French progressive music) to make an alarming leap into public consciousness within the reasonably near future tense! Well, after you read the nice little catalogue they include with the package, that is.

Address: activesuspension@hotmail.com

Listing Ship - Dance Class Revolution (cd by A True Classical CD / Transparency)

The immediate commonality between all these latest Transparency / A True Classical CD / Falata-Galia cds is how well they are recorded. Clean clean clean. Los Angeles combo Listing Ship (formerly Leather Hyman) birth a series of dark red songs stained with water and prickly like Little Ot’k, the hungry wooden baby from Jan _vankmajer's recent magnum .44 opus.

And yet we issue these little records with so much heart and soul and mind to them, like messages in a bottle through which we've just drunk away our sorrows - and will all 500 copies or so find their audience? Eventually, ultimately? This is the faraway promise of modern music. That your feelings will somehow mesh and enfold the feelings of someone else, or perhaps several "someone elses".

Listing Ship sing into the probable void with all confidence about all things great and small and beauteous, moving like the female Red Chinese soldiers who grace the disc insert, with aplomb and panache and fortitude enough to keep any vessel afloat.

Address: info@transparency.tv

Kenneth Atchley - Fountains (cd by Auscultare Research / Ground Fault)

"This is sound not of waves, nor ripples on the surface; but on top of that: the foam, the embellishment.

And so on.

Contact microphones are x'd with black duct tape to shiny trashcans on the cover. In the liner notes, there are descriptions of things done while the concept and execution of these fountains were realised. Going about his business, taking in culture, listening, watching, reading. A fountain of information and influence and inspiration to go along with the more easily-identifiable water water water seeking its own level. And along with the sound of water, in the mind, comes the scent of water itself - as it is said, long-term olfactory memory is almost unassailable and can a more measured approach to sound somehow encourage a triggering of other senses, even the sixth or seventh sense?

At times it seems as if the waterfall has expanded to encompass a great and grand cathedral, water crackling like blocks being torn asunder and then rebuilt yet again. With cascading water as the backdrop, all manner of "unnatural" sounds find their way into the slipstream, detritus amongst the eddies, changing the channels and the riverways all the while. Static enters the fold and wobbles the speaker cones as if they were acorns bobbing on an angry and shifting shore, against the backdrop of a slowly lowing foghorn and a gathering wind. A slow fade of water off to the horizon, and then the dripping tap emerges. You know, previously, listening to a dripping tap for 20 minutes usually meant a call to the plumber. A banging on metal, amidst the drip drip drip, blossoms gradually from nowhere. A sudden stop, and only the gently moving soul of water remains, along with all the heavy sound that it potentially can carry...

Address: http://www.groundfault.net

Frode Gjerstad Trio - Last First (cd by Falata-Galia)

Starring Mr. Gjerstad (on alto sax, alto flute, and bass clarinet), ¯vind Storesund (acoustic bass), and Paal Nilssen-Love (on drums). The flute rises slowly into the twilight of the piece, ferried by the gentle underpinnings of the bass. And, since it's "Last First", "twilight" is a perfect description of the sounds because twilight comes after sunset and before the dawn. Now the frenzied skronk of the sax and mania of the drums, galumphing bass besides and behind. Then the cooling-down period, and the tones fall from their respectively respectful instruments in languid splendor. The sounds creep along the carpet, searching searching searching and playing off one another until there is a harmony of action and purpose. And now, like a cat, the drums and horns and basses leap fast and furry, like Mel Brooks dancing homeless in "Life Stinks", tail twitching to and fro across the ride cymbal into further watchfulness now.

The jazz inherent is the feeling of being closely watched as one drives down darkening streets to a future that is unclear and untrue, as sodium lights turn on and off, faulty wiring moving them to their own odd time signatures and crimes...

Address: http://www.falcata-galia.com

Comae - Comae (cd by rhiz)

A crackling and an occasional guitar strum, and the gentle rattling of beads. Or so it seems. Again, with sounds that are unusual (initially), comes a desire to identify, rather than simply to listen. The tolling of a miles-away bell, and the scratch and skip of vinyl. These identifications come with curiosity and possible ultimate negligibility. Fittingly enough, the "each / remain" time coding on my cd player is not working on these tracks. Unidentifiable sounds, in the end, I suppose.

Bells? Bottles? Synthesizers? A rise, and the swift sonic descent and then a lull, like a leaf so green falling from the tree and falling through other leaves on its inevitable death spiral downwards. It lies quiet a while, then returns with sizzling and spatial lowing. "Pavane" ends the recording with possibly a 16 rpm return to the carefree days of Ravel. I miss liner notes. Don't you miss liner notes? I understand the desire to keep things rather mysterious, but, well, shit. However, in the wise words of the Chinese sage Lo Pan, "You are not put on this Earth to "get it".

But this is not miserable, life-denying sound. It's as if one has just awoken to see a spinning mobile of jewels hung directly and angelic over one's head.

Address: rhiz@rhiz.org

Sleepytime Gorilla Museum - Grand Opening and Closing (cd by Seeland)

Grunty ug-rock stylings and the Cookie Monster vocals besides. Well, that's how it begins, at least. Offset by female reveries and intensely intricate packaging harboring an entire world inside it, the pieces are "...written collectively, with song ideas arising out of group improvisations and subject to merciless revision by all Museum members." Faintly reminiscent of the dog that fatally mauled the schoolteacher. "She hangs her skin up by the window"...there is a particularly unique brand of aberrration that seems to coalesce in the San Francisco Bay area (cf. The Residents, Caroliner Rainbow, The Dead Kennedys) into which this recording fits very well. Much guitar, of the electric variety - the album itself is, in the words of Vyvyan from "The Young Ones", "Very metal" and a nearly literally dissonant elephant...

Address: http://www.negativland.com/nmol/index.html

Neck Doppler - Future Hits Vol. 1 (cdR by Consume)

Another very well-produced cdR - this one has the Consume label's name printed out on that sticky tape with the raised letters, as used on many office products... It's very clean, which counts these days, believe it or don't. Echoey drums and vocals urgently exhort on to "listen". The vocals are rudimentary, brutal; cut off suddenly in some cases. It's as if these are little songs that have been marinating in ruminations all day, buzzing around in the head and neck of Mr. Doppler, and this is his way of exorcising these annoying little demons. Distorted voice and laser beam percussions now, amidst the smoke of the odd-timed melody and incongruous piano. Scratching and xylophonies now, underscoring a certain amount of reality that is kept. "All Coming Back To Me Now" features the speeding beat and a voice cutting itself to confetti. It all winds up with "Degenerate", and actually, it's listed as "DeGeNeRatE" on the sleeve - the change in lettering more or less crystallises the tenor of the tones eloquently.

Address: the.consumer@ntlworld.com

David Schafer - x10R.1 / x10R.2 (dbl cd by Transparency)

Wherein "ten easy listening records played at the same time (either in "two-second gaps" or "variable gaps") that take you right up above the muzak Ïther". The design and execution of this particular curiosity are green and impeccable. It's a bit like changing channels on the radio, this - however, the only stations available are the easy listening ones. This is not necessarily a bad thing - and this would make a phantastic installation piece. At times, the waves of nostalghia buffet gently against one's craft, depending on whatever pharmaceuticals one has at hand - at other times, it's as if the drug spiral drags one down through the nightmare psycho-logical sequences from a 1960s film where the ending is anything but certain.

In the face of considerable - yet identifiable cacophony - the mind picks out recognisable and comforting snippets (usually rhythmic) with which to console itself. Alessandro Alessandroni is the person behind the unique whistling on the Sergio Leone Western soundtracks is . That's the most vivid thing I could find.

This is a simultaneously comforting and cacophonic series of recordings - a rare duality indeed.

Address: info@transparency.tv

Eye and Ear Control - Pushing at the Door (cd by Consume)

Awkward silences + sounds: Neck Doppler and The Render General; remote transmissions: Pet Tombola. An initial stretching and warrrrrrrrping of a song of Shostakovich and his son - apparently conducting. And, in a far-removed sort of way, the name of his son actually does compose this particular piece. High tones and backward-playing of the phrase, as if sifted time and again by someone older and very forgetful, faster and faster until they become a blur of raw sound, stripped of meaning and context.

"And They're Pushing at the Door of Our Fridge" features some excessively high tones vanishing into the air as occasional beats slap their way against the cold. A changing of channels on British broadcasting slips in and out of the proceedings. A live action at Glasgow's 13th Note CafŽ, it would be interesting to discover how the sounds were all done there and hot on spot. Advertising jingles and phrases and programmes jumble the air - jumble, that scrambled word game! Beats strike in unexpectedly and there's a bit of Chris Isaak (and many others, I suspect) in there - just then! Hectic, hectoring, hassling and happy - it's all there.

"Mosquito Tambourine" brings together weird and weird and weird and weird, now wait, I'm doing it! Cunt cunt cunt cunt cunt, and so on. An inter view with a pop band, cut up and served again to formerly disinterested listeners that now will sit up and take notice of the deft sound manipulations and control of eye and / or ear. To twist the appropos phrase, "Take it to other dimensions / levels, higher / ike Billy Joel said, "We didn't start the fire!"...

Address: the.consumer@ntlworld.com

V/A - Institute of Sonology 1959 - 69: Early Electronic Music (cd by Sub Rosa)

"Piano-Forte", by Dick Raaijmakers, begins this subtle study of the absolute outre - a kind of music (musique concrete et al) pursued in the early days of modern experimental music, for the consuming ethic of "being interested in something". Various piano sounds, tinkling and thudding, cut-up and blasted, with sudden stops that have only become more blurred as time has passed and our editing technologies have improved. Or have they? Frits Weiland's "Studie in Lagen Impulsen" is next, gently whooshing and hissing and building layers of same across a field of musical heating grates which also huff air upward. Ton Bruynel's "Reflexen" further challenges the talent to describe sound as it is happening, with its sudden right and left turns, scrabbling in the sonic dirt, and percussive burbling.

Konrad Boehmer, who organised and arranged this particular gem of soundart archaeology, weighs in with "Aspekt", recorded 1966 - 1968, at which point more than a few of us were still swimming around someplace. It sputters like electrical live wiring, all pieces doubtless culled from a multitude of sonic fathers (the identity of which is not revealed, even in the liner notes, which are a wealth of history from that time). It shatters through the air in the innocent catastrophe that is entropy itself, falling apart, recombining and recomposing as it changes through the length of the piece. It accelerates in fits and starts, elegiacally presaging the rate and weight of the world in the ensuing decades.

Gottfried Michael Koenig's "Funktion Orange" buzzes like citric acid spilt from the fruit into a cut, dull pain over sharp and back again. It crackles and whines with errant magnetic waves but these words aren't even nearly enough to describe the anarchic majesty of what is currently hassling my speakers. Rainer Riehn's "Chants de Maldoror" is the final piece: jazz record mixed with a faroff and occasional stickbeat. Squeaky hinges and cascading diamonds and rains of crunky frogs follow, and it's perhaps a bit fallacious to try to assign organic attributes to electronic institutes, but, one does what one must...

With the exception of Ton Bruynel, who died in 1999, these founding fathers of modern experimental music are still alive, and, hopefully, still working. Why not drop them a line, show yr old dad that you care?

Address: http://www.subrosa.net

MAZK - Mazk (cd by Noise Asia / Sonic Factory)

"Material recorded live at Pezner Club in Lyon, France on September 17, 1999. Re-edited and mastered at Bunker 301 Studio in Tokyo, Japan, in May 2000."

Warped static crackles undulate over the steady rhythm of a faraway metal. This record is released on PNF's label in Hong Kong (PNF, the duo of Dickson Dee and Li Chin Sung, were featured previously on "Turntable Solos", released on Sachiko M's Amoebic Records). Zbigniew Karkowski and Masami Akita have this unique relationship that has defined enough demarcations as to vividly illustrate each of their respective voices and outlooks when it comes to making loud sound. Many different rhythms shine through the smog of the moment that would make Tinguely tingle and proud... It's a little like watching a child take to its first drumkit - a few rhythms and beats repeated and repeated until it's time for that particular child to take a nap. This is headturning, pantshaking sound for sure - a different experience occurs when one turns one's head to explain to the inquiring mind just what it is that's being played.

Like cards in the spokes of a speeding bicycle that is constantly on the verge of breakdown, MAZK tunnel into the immediate psyche and lock the brakes, poring over every pebble as it's picked from the eventual street pizza that is downright lowdown...

Address: sfinde@netvigator.com

V/A - Vertical Forms (cd by Vertical Form)

It smells beautifully, of maple syrup. Unfortunately, there ain't no fucking sleeve notes. Thanks, penurious promo people! It begins with a vaguely Asian passage of music and shortwave mixed in amongst the fine fuck music beats, which is to say that it is suited for the late-night drive of figuring out something about him or her, and the way that uncertain something makes you smile and run that third red light... Listen and don't let anyone else's voice disturb your enjoyment of it. A more simple, crunchy rhythm conspires along with various beeps and frazzled tones, bringing in the occasional tubular bell. Vertical forms, yes - insofar as one overriding visual is that of 0s and 1s falling over one another in a cavalcade of patterns and shapes, at odd times and in startling motions, and then slowing up for the final gentle melody of an ant foraging...

Very icebox, this.

Address: mail@verticalform.com

The New Blockaders - Changez Le Blockeurs (lp by The New Blockaders)

"We are The New Blockaders. Blockade is resistance. It is our duty to blockade and to induce of thers to blockade. What is blockading? - This. It is time for change - make way for The New Blockaders! The Discipline of Absolute Freedom! Abolish everything! Wake up! Never mind anything else - let us leave the dead alone. Onward and upward The New Blockade! The Black is History. We have disrespectfully shattered it into four disparate pieces. From these pieces we will invent new eyes, new histories, new systems, new languages, new futures, new arrangements, new answers, new images, new substances, new ideologies, new lives, new deaths, new ways of doing, new ways of seeing, new ways of thinking, new ways of making...we are The Modern Alchemists...let us bomb the temples of History - of Logic, or Religion, of Reason, of Psychology, of Authority, of Service of Philosophy, of Money, of Sex, of Science, of Nations, of Wars, of Monarchies, of Polotic (sic), of Professionalism, of The Old Creators! Let us plough new furrows! Let us depart from these mere journalists, let us demolish these fetid blocks of stability, of security, of tradition, of certainty, of unquestioning worship...let us be the Murderors (sic) of the Past! We are the Sea chipping away at this rotting abortion of morality, dismantling the defences of totalitarian constrain (sic), smashing the safety of superficiality, throwing stones at the icons of religion...the obscene progression of regression shall be halted by us, The New Blockaders! Let us be anonymous, o brothers and sisters, let us work in subtle ways and then at dawn our hour of glory shall come! Let us be chameleons. Let us infiltrate their ranks unnoticed...only attacks from behind ever succeed! Let us sever this Parasite called History, it has nothing to do with us! Death to the bourgeois! Death to the aristocracy! Death to the Dictatorship of the Proletariat! There are no byes in our crucade! (sic) Your stinking corpses will all be burnt! This I the future! This is now! Move over you museum relics! This attack shall never be compromised, never accomodated, we are everywhere! Only carcinoma need fear our joyful brunt...ah, the glorious sound of its dying screams! Get out of our world, you poisonous scum! Avaunt! Avaunt! Avaunt! The Church of the Absurd marches on. Anti-books, anti-newspapers, anti-films, anti-art, anti-magazines, anti-poetry, anti-music, anti-clubs, anti-communications! We will make anti-statements about anything and everything, we will make a point of being pointless, we will drive backwards up one-way streets! Typewriters will become pianos...with which we will compose anti-symphonies! We must destroy in order to go forward! The Farce has gone on too long! Now let the Farce be made a Farce of! We are the Abraham-men of today, we are the adverts that mean nothing, we are the speakers who say nothing, we are the fighters who do not fight, we are the creators who destroy..... We spit on your works of art! We vomit on your politicians! We laugh at the malitia (sic) men! How does this work? Oh, it is meant to blow people's heads off...Sehr gut, sehr gut! All in the cause of democracy, what? You shall never pacify us, you brainless cretins! We vote for nobody...for the right reasons!"

One of the top ten liner notes, ever.

Address: Richard Rupenus, Beehive House, North Broomhill, Morpeth, Northumberland NE65 9UD, England

Frode Gjerstad & Nick Stephens - North Atlantic Drift (cd by Falata-Galia)

With Mr. Gjerstad on alto saxophone and Mr. Stephens on double bass, the contemplative footfalls of walks in the woods are brought forth for the faraway listeners. The notes rise and fall, playing with each other and following a particular purity of a current as they're imbued with the sense of the eponymous drift. The tones are reasonably gentle and assured, but move (at times) as if under a spell or hypnotised by their own inevitable return to rhythms. "Becoming Cyclonic - for Tony Williams" summons an elegy for the deceased drummer, whose passing was revealed on one of those selfsame walks. Full-circle?

Is the legacy of jazz to bring all times - past, present and future - into an enlightened whole, an eternal now that draws many lines into one circle?

Address: http://www.falcata-galia.com/

Small Rocks - Carbondating (cd by Hot Air)

The sleeve comes with a "handy scale in centimeters (for measuring your own small rocks)". Fucking brilliant idea, that one. We need more multisubjectival record sleeves. A scary Yeti-like creature abominably juggles various small rocks on the back. The sounds jump and down like the adorable oxygen-rich blood of Smurfs, and "the Wand touch" is bestowed upon our modern world of grunts, burps and barfs. The glamorous clamor of the sound is perfect for those with overactive synapses or high intelligence quotients - chill-out music for the jaunty set. It's a very blatantly and overtly fun record.

Address: http://www.simplesampling.com

si-cut.db - Enthusiast (cd by Bip-Hop)

A snaking crackle and hiss and subtle beat pervades the opening sounds and in the digital realm, how enthusiastic can one be about zeroes and ones? Well, of course, they're rarely seen or experienced as such, but still...they're there, all-encompassing and insidious. Faintly dubby echoes lie prostrate beneath the static cling. It galumphs along with a sense of journeying, of travelling, to it. It's a bit like the small, repetitive video game anthems in arcade games from the early-mid 1980s. Much head-nodding. Well, the keeping-beat kind, not the sleeping-beat kind! Zowie with the echo now, and it seems that smaller sounds, even when gathered together in this way or that, still retain their identity and innocuity. It's a very patient album, moving alongside fuck music as the equally-important situation of drive music (i.e. for very late nights when the house won't suffice and the hunger isn't quite there yet and the wet humidity of fresh air is needed in the form of a drive down a very long road).

And yet, with the advent and popularity of the laptop in modern composing, are we growing closer to people, to process, or to zeroes and ones? Perhaps, even in embracing the digital, such a divide can be addressed in a way that's more poignant and true and playful than was previously thought.

So it is with enthusiasts like these...

Address: ip@bip-hop.com

V/A - Nonplace Souvenirs (cd by ooze.b‰p)

"(heterohomgenous digital art, a cross situation). Sometimes, people abduced by technotoys. Teens or childs 30 years old. Music mades by itself. Powerbooks outside the library - a nonpower library - executing the music style - a nonfreestyle. Digital diaries of the immediate. Laptop lash technolapsed [Fun&tech co.\. Monophonic macs apple masks. Entertainment and its art residues." From the liner notes on the cover - fucking-a RIGHT!

The players: Christof Migone, Vert, Artificial Memory Trace, Klunk, Pablo Reche, Criterion, David Loss, Remot. In order. First a hiss and then the seeming floating of the big-breasted woman in water nudging up against the oscillating bell put in place of the foghorn. A repetition, for Mr. Migone. A hum, a humming. It's a very live setting, although one suspects that it is a series of soundfiles played in a particular order. Well, perhaps the files themselves were recorded live. I just keep shrugging those shoulders...

The snuffling, shuffling beasts (digital, naturally) of Klunk's piece create their own veldt but where are the inevitable Snauses? Remot weighs in with a zowie melody and the kind of hollowed drums reminiscent of a blue wastebin but this building does not collapse, it builds itself up around oneself as the tones crystallise from the harmony of the speakers, gentle tones knitting together the eaves of your own private sepulchre... Vert's "The Tide Goes In and the Tide Goes Out" does just that, bringing in a gentle eddy of melody along the jutting digital divide of coral reefs, and a bird! David Loss follows it up with a faroff static storm, and then a lightly-tapped out melody, although you don't really hear the tapping, but it does sound like it came from a computer. I mean, not the fan part. That other part. No, not the cupholder. That part right there.

Artificial Memory Trace brings a certain amount of factory ambiance to the piece, moving it through both speakers as if he is delivering something from one department to the next, and eventually to yours. A very quiet factory with occasional anomalous spots of rhythm and squelches, various voices ebbing and reaching out of the darkness. Pablo Reche's "Instalaci—n" grumbles along in measured time, but lest you turn your speakers up you will be dealing with a particularly ornery kind of speaker-eater, as it rockets past various high tones, a bit like a skipping record, come to think...and the final piece by Criterion summons the urge to put on sunglasses and stride purposefully as the meathook killer always does, through a landscape of the mind now fractured into cold digital, ones, and fittingly enough, zeroes...

Address: didac@oozebap.org

Amps For Christ - The Oak In The Ashes (cd by Shrimper)

Banjo, drums, guitar, feedback, grit and short songs about various people and things. A little house on the prairie but without the mind-numbingly large amounts of accidents and natural calamities. This is a kind of American folk that, as with most folk, will go almost completely unnoticed - the boot on the fence along the information superhighway. Indeed, there's a version of "Scotland The Brave", wilting from the speakers with fuzz like a kilt. Dead? No, hardly.

And now sitar sits in on a softly sung Middle Eastern piece, "Nese", and there's an attendant squiggle on the "s" in that word but Microsoft Word don't do that sort of thing. Jingoistic software? There is a deeply poignant sense of yearning and longing in these songs - or just what is it? Is the longing for a place in time or a place and time - or is it for something that happened in that long-ago, for which one pines but cannot completely identify? A perfume forgotten, a remark made and then suppressed, an item that is no longer made but made an impression out of the corner of one's eye?

Is nostalghia just a case of mistaken identity?

Address: dist'd by Revolver http://www.midheaven.com

Bedouin Ascent - Junk Force ep (cd by No Immortal)

Well, my promotional copy is one hell of a nice cdR. The moire on the label feels like a "normal" cd does, and the entire package (including the colour-copied sleeve that smells of wet leaves) is exceptionally exemplary. Well, so too was it with the home-taping years...sometimes you got the candy and sometimes, you got the wrapper.

And the music? Very beat-oriented, very syncopated, bat bat bat bat, and all that that that that. Lots of percussion leading to much nodding of one's head. A hectic cleaning of utensils in the kitchen while being hassled unduly by divebombing bees. Unfortunately, as they are shamefully as-yet-unheard here in the States, the loud level at which these recordings should be heard (i.e. in clubs, with clubs) may sadly go unattained for some time yet.

One suspects that if this is what bedouins use to ascend, their trajectories might be somewhat stifled by the rather less-than-hip mullahs floating around the world today...

Address: info@no-immortal.com

Bobb Bruno - The Shy Tuff Bunny Runs Away (cd by Transparency)

Actually, since the cover is littered with photos of cats in various stages and poses, the phrase should be "The shy tuff bunny runned away!". Cats usually remain unseen because they're generally alone. There's a fine line between genuine wackiness and the self-consciously nutty - this cat is a tightrope walker driving over Niagra Falls to save Yves Montand stuck with his eternal shipment of nitro. Perhaps, in this case, the shipment is of nitrous. But this isn't really telling you anything about the sound, is it? Well, now.

A soft scratching at a melody revolves itself into the chaos and scree of the ensuing backward masking of tones mixed in amongst what seems to be a pouring of grain from a burlap sack. A fractured beat, and a snippet of dialogue. It is unclear. The melting pot of the American experience is not always simply the flesh of the immigrant, but the vast psychic morphogenetic field from which countless ideas have sprung for the past 200+ years. Guitar and high frequencies, distorted beats dissolving into other chaoses.

Crazy-quilts are impressive and beautiful to look at, but does anyone actually sleep beneath one?

Address: info@transparency.tv

Codec Scovill - Clinical Imperfections (cd by Nonresponse)

Like a mirror with a slight flaw, the sound on the initial recordings comes through in heatborne waves, wobbling and bent, entering into slightly esoteric fuck music in excelsis. A high pitch, slow and inside, and it's said that this album was worked on for a year before its eventual release. Can time - the experiences, the life lived, the chances and failures - be communicated in any nonverbal way in music or the attendant creation of sound? And how intimate a portrait is the final recording? The cover art is a series of geometric shapes, in shades of dark and light, looking as if carved from a vast mountain, atop which holds the possibility of wisdom but also the probability of snow and more of it.

It's faintly reminiscent of the Kosmische movement in the 1960s and 1970s - insofar as there is a vast, expanding sense of space with these sounds, suitable at low levels and high - well, not that high, I want to keep my speakers! The sense of the cosmic, rather - of drifting, of holding, and of eventual otherness. The rhythmic tapping and clouds of misty tones meld into each other, one after the next after the et cetera.

This is in fact one of the more gorgeous recordings of this year thus far.

Address: http://www.nonresponse.com/

Cray - Undo (cd by Bip-Hop)

Soft sizzling like bacon on the grill and does one undo the apron and cook naked? Of course not. Well, I mean, unless that's your "kink"...but the reaction is to listen closely, more intently to softer sounds, or to ignore it and thereby relegate it to the woeful world of dishwashing music. Slight echoes from further down the cave, underwater and barely lit, and then these beautiful angelic melodies ebb and pulse outward, past the barnacles and the bathyspheres, undulating with every ocean current of sound. As they rise to the surface, their structure erodes - fluttering and fracturing and flooding the air above with a fine luminescent powder...

Those melodies swing low at this point, across a pollen-field of digital tones and scratching from somewhere unseen yet very nearby that leaves a hissing in the ears upon exiting. It's as if there's a certain amount of sonic autism extant - as if the composer is moving at much different speeds than his surroundings and peers, and the information gleaned through those passages is processed and reformed at different rates. Many backwards-flitting sounds, no small amount of twittering, and the scent of water fills the air... Do certain sounds also double as aural rorschach tests, or dream symbols? That is, if there is a certain amount of water heard in a recording, I suspect it works as fuck music, too. If the sound of a hotdog being thrown down a hallway is heard - hey now! The chugging malfunctioning starter motor has its way now, scattering into glass fragments as the band plays on...

Address: ip@bip-hop.com

Crib - Remnant (cd by A True Classical CD)

Sounds of the locomotive and birds besides (in a faraway way) begin the meditation on travelling and what's left behind, in the latest incarnation of Devin Sarno's Crib, which includes Jeff Gauthier, G.E. Stinson, Nels Cline, Petra Haden, Joseph Hammer, and Britt Randle. This achingly gorgeous series of field recordings and long bass drones and sporadic strings is exactly what you'd get were you to take a tour of California's central coast, driving along the 101 Freeway. This freeway pokes through the region of Los Angeles to San Francisco, stretching through vineyards and the fields, along dusty lonely roads and past that Amtrak train winding its serpentine way through brown hills scorched by endless summers and the certain total blackness of nighttime without streetlamps.

This is the sound of peripheral awareness of the external world when one is wrapped up in one's own thoughts and realising that, no matter where one goes in this modern world, there is always the sound of a motor...

Address: info@transparency.tv

Domotic - Bye Bye (cd by Active Suspension)

The startling sonority of the human voice: "The other day, when the sun was shining into the classroom, I took out my mirror and shone it on the wall. "Who is shining a mirror on the wall?", asked our teacher. "Come out here and shine it for all of us. Now take another look at yourself in the mirror, and then sit down again." I was ashamed of myself because all the children were laughing at me." A dulcet series of bell tones, and then a motorik little melody emerges along the spiral roadways of the compact disc.

The tones are rather reminiscent of opening of presents when very young - they have a crystalline and antiquated quality to them, even as the modern oddly-timed crackles parade across the tunes. It's a childlike quality, essentially - these songs, the opening spoken words, the title - despite the irony of the press notes tarting up the "So, is Domotic music made by robot-humans, or music made for human-robots, or...". It's an innocent gentle exploration of various simple melodies again and again, sometimes interrupted by the onset of slightly more digital and "adult" computer jiggery-pokery.

All in all, rather exceptional, this fucking album...

Address: http://www.activesuspension.org

V/A - The Answering Machine Solution (cd by Staalplaat)

"This CD celebrates the 100th cd release of Staalplaat. Not a mere compilation but a tool. It contains a wide variety of sounds that you can load on your answering machine . The first part of the cd are ready made pieces, followed by a series of sound-only material. You can use these to speak your own text (the Karajoke part). The third section contains material which you can leave on answering machines that you have called. And the fourth part is something special... This booklet contains a lot of texts for those who practise karajoke for their machines. Needless to say that you have to translate the text in your language!"

And that's precisely what is. One of the best compilations ever, I guaran-f'ing-tee it. It's a great collection of sounds with which one can hector the answering machines of friends and enemies alike. Some of the contributions from the European contingent share a fascination with American evangelical speakers and Jack Chick-level Christianity. Others hold a particular inquisitiveness and fascination with the human voice, and about the telephonic medium at large. Nigel Ayers' field recording of shamanic songs of Yemani upon installation of telephone equipment - to bring good luck - are particularly illuminating.

Address: http://www.staalplaat.com

The Durutti Column - Sex and Death (cd by Factory Too)

Now this is...it's too incredible for words. Vini Reilly and his Durutti Column have been making the best, most unassailable, revelatory and incandescent fuck music since forever, reaching an apogee and a zenith with their "The Guitar and Other Machines". This one has impeccably recorded acoustic guitars, the googolplex of the echoplex, Peter Hook on bass at one point, the post-coital kissing bliss of "Believe In Me", and much arpeggiating. Arpeggiating makes for great fuck music. Put this on, and "Kind of Blue" by Miles Davis, and "Senzuri Power-Up!" by The Gerogerigegege...hey, wait, where are you going? Wait, come back!

A stratospheric firework of an album that refuses to go out. It's irresolutely beautiful. I think I just crashed the yogurt truck into my copy. Hoo-yah!

Address: 825 Eighth Avenue, New York City, New York 10019

Jonathan Hughes - Trillium (cd by The Foundry)

Pulses and vibrant electronic atmosphere cradles the speakers in gentle waves and this is the kind of music that gives solace to those locked up in prisons across the nation - if broadcast, if heard. It's a revelatory gesture when fuck music consoles those who fuck, and the truly fucked. I find it fascinating that compact discs are becoming more and more aromatic these days - this one smells of maple syrup, like the Transparency label discs do. "Although not always obvious at first (or at all), all the tracks on this cd are in the 3/4 time signature. Trillium is neither a radioactive isotope nor a newly discovered planet - it is a three-petaled flower in the lily family." Hence the hint of an eyeball - echoes of the iris - luxuriating through the album artwork.

It's a collection of sounds that is sweeping and yet simultaneously intimate, reminiscent of something almost-forgotten. It's like a word misheard, an unidentified sigh - a very gentle reminder that some things are not always as we define them. On "Lua", the beats enter into the equasion, in the aforementioned 3/4 time. It's waltz-time, and occasionally short voices drift through a Sargasso sea of aluminum-tainted memory. "Heavy Water" continues the rhythm but in a softer way, as though not to make the baby cry. And why am I re viewing these things? What about baby?

It's a little like watching those old films in slow-motion of flowers expanding, growing outward, again and again, shuddering into the rarefied air, wilting, and starting anew...

Address: http://www.foundrysite.com/

Jaga Jazzist - A Livingroom Hush (cd by Smalltown Supersound)

Okay, any website that has four pop-up windows when you first log on to it has to die. Very bad, guys.

The music itself? Frenetic, drumnbass bees divebombing into a cloud of jazzist horns and dulcet tones, into a chocolate cheesecake melange of smooth downbeat jazz. It creeps around corners and creiks down the staircase in a very "magic hour" sort of way - it's fine for afternoon slow dancing as the sun slants through the slats of the blinds and your cat moves in accordance with the waning of the day. Back through the clouds of bees now - clattering with their warbling organ tones and chattering amongst themselves with the rapid rate of the high-hat. The final piece, "Cinematic", explores the same guitared tones and twilight spaces again and again, flowing to the horizon in resplendence and not looking back at what has come before...

It's smooth, clean, serviceable and workmanlike modern fuck music jazz. Hey now!

Address: info@smalltownsupersound.com

A Small Good Thing - Slim Westerns Vol II (cd by Leaf)

"Jane Russell", from "Slim Westerns" is one of the most beautiful pop songs ever. Hands fckn down.

So it is with a certain amount of excitement that I spread the good word about this, the followup to that particular magnum .44 opus. Languid acoustic guitars hang like dead coyotes along the fences built by "A Might Stillness", and there is much lowing & ooh-oohing; with Andrew Hulme (O Yuki Conjugate) on bogus marimba. The songs have a particular, unique gait to them - waltzing easily across the horizon and then vanishing, one after another; tumbling into the deep, concentric tones pooling out from the first "Slim Westerns".

Animal screams augur an oncoming storm, which fades into the sunset of a remedial piano. It's as if someone from a cargo cult had seen a Western just once, and devoted a long period of time to re-approximating the cultural signifiers in a world where John Ford is just as deific as John Frum. The storm on the horizon, broken Spanglish, clip-clop clip-clop, the yells of the vaqueros, and the mantra of the word "hey" - all wind themselves into a new folklore that lives somewhere in the recesses of memory, shimmering much like the gorgeous cast of these exemplary recordings.

Address: leaf@posteverything.com

Cornucopia - .C. (cdR by Assemblage)

Well, it's packed like the old Inner-X tapes use to be - for me, that's a big plus. Strange chemical odor emits from the cdR and the attendant plastic packaging, and the sound is somewhat similar - a series of leaks and splashes, with the attendant hum and din of announcements from on-high. The effect is much like the hearing of quiet things from beneath a sewer, or a sidewalk, or a tunnel. It stays at a particularly particulate level and then intensifies - not immediately, but subtly; as though the listener were surfacing through a vast effervescent wet sea of memories and everything that those imply.

Address: assemblage@freeuk.com

The New Blockaders - Seinsart (cdR by Siren)

"Contains two live performances at Morden Tower, Newcastle, England in 1983. Originally released by RRRecords in 1988."

The cyclone hits and sheets of pure metal godlike shrieking rain down and ring out for a little less than forty minutes. Unrelenting and visceral, it's a phoenix in its execution and a peacock in its diversity. There are many levels to one word used to describe a particular sound. The word "shrieking", for example, has edges, levels and sides to it, although they may sometimes be difficult to discern. One person hears a shriek in an entirely different way than does another. A bird could hear a shriek and think that it's being called to. It ends, and it's exhilarating. Audience dulls around a bit, and then another simoom in the room - a lower kind of grating now, from three or four sound sources. Occasional stalactites of sound jut from the proceedings and there seem to be "breakdowns" in the sound from time to time but it is unclear. Squeaking and rolling, quaking and cajoling, and the sound spikes and speaks and spills from the guts of that time and place.

These recordings are almost twenty years old. It still holds the same power to incite, inspire and unnerve that it had when first it emerged and, with any luck, shall retain this claim for many years to come.

Address: sirenrec@hotmail.com

Masonna - Destructive Microphone (5" by Alley Sweeper)

Mademoiselle Anne Sanglante Ou Notre Nymphomanie AurŽolŽ on this one. Lovely golden vinyl. Whither goeth Alley Sweeper these days? This is a second edition, so they must have raked in a certain amount of cash. Perhaps it was a little rake. Someday I will put out an inter view 7" of Madonna speaking with Yamazaki-san, saying, "Why steal my thunder?" Of course, that's immediately after the release of the inter view split 7" of Ashley Judd and Ashley Juggs, pro-am sex star.

Oh, that's right, what's it sound like. It's Yamazaki-san yelling into the microphone, eeeurghh eeeurghh eeeurghh eeeurghh eeeurghh and all that. It seems to work best at 33 1/3, otherwise you just wouldn't take it as seriously as you should. I wonder what he's saying? It comes with a handy lock groove (a pop and a hiss) so that your record player can give you remix material with which to work in future.

Address: Alley Sweeper, P.O. Box 361, Clawson MI 48017-0361

Panicsville / John Wiese - split release (5" by Helicopter US)

An edition of 300, this handsomely-packaged, simply-executed release features 45 RPM of John Wiese and 33 1/3 of Panicsville entombed along with a hand x-ray in a roofing paper sleeve. A nice tactile experience, feeling that paper open languidly in one's hand. The John Wiese side is a storm of frequencies, moving along in a musique concrete sort of way between the shortwave stations, exposing many different qualities of sound itself. The Panicsville side starts with a childlike whimpering and evolves into a rhythmic drone and scratch, edging along until a precipitous drop into accordions and zowie static.

Address: johnwiese@earthlink.net

Non - Solitude (7" by Mute)

An edition of 700, this 7" features two holes in its axis, "Solitude" from the "Receive the Flame" album, and a collection of 8 locked grooves on the b-side. "Solitude" is a lush repetitive movement waltzing off into the sunset - a rather gorgeous pop moment, really. As the locked grooves play, the sound is gradually revealed in their multifarious nefarious levels. A sample of "Be My Baby" by The Ronnettes appears, second lock groove in. It's a bit like archaeology - digging and digging and then brushing away the attendant moss and dross. But wherefore art thou, locked groove 3" on paper record?

It's a work of brilliance and rowdy neighbour control. There should be more records like this rotating for eternity.

Address: http://www.mute.com/

The New Blockaders / Organum - Der Graben (7" by Die Stadt)

It's three minutes total of very loud, metallic sounds. A woman smiles out from a black-and-white photo on both sides of the sleeve. The vinyl is grey. One side has a slightly different metallic tone to it than the other.

Like many things in the lives of both Blockaders New and Organum - it's over too soon.

Address: http://www.diestadtmusik.de

Null - Erg / Sec (7" with sawblade by Manifold)

It's a clear 7" glued or otherwise affixed to a real metal sawblade. How great is that?! The "bummer" part is that they only made 105 - so if you can find a copy, etc.

The sound is a fast, syncopated recording of what seems to be metal against metal, like the quickly accelerating wheels of a bullet train, with the dust thrown up in its wake settling as the crackle of the vinyl of this most remarkable record.

Address: http://www.manifoldrecords.com/

Jliat - Of Musicology, Volume 1 / Volume 2 (12" by Jliat)

"If anything is destroyed in a deconstructive reading, it is not the text, but the claim to unequivocal domination of one mode of signifying over another. A deconstructive reading is a reading which analyses the specificity of a text's critical difference from itself."

Dude, what he said. Synth notes from across 88+ keys tumble out, ready for a beauty contest at which everyone's a winner. It's a very progressive sentiment, and this is a more blatantly tonal album than previous Jliat outings. It makes me want to play videogames - a lot of video games! Phoenix! Bosconian! Wizard of Wor! "Ha ha ha - dying out of spite?!" This music is going to make me really good at videogames! And so on.

It's spacey and far-out distant and a very strange thing to emerge now - a lost soundtrack, disconnected like the dialogue on the label is to the music that surrounds it.

Address: james@jliat.demon.co.uk

Stock, Hausen & Walkman - Hang-Ups (7" by Hot Air)

Lots of rhythmic farty noises, syncopated belches, flushing and other sounds to make baby laugh and dance and make sympathetic karate moves along with the mice and hamsters fighting in between the grooves. This is irrepressibly upbeat and joyous music - something of which there is a decided dearth these days.

Single of the month - only I'm not sure what month. Choose one.

Address: http://www.simplesampling.com/

Mr. Wand & Mr. Lane - Good Vibrations (7" by Hot Air)

Pressed in an edition of 300, these are "Recordings taken from an installation where an original copy of the Beach Boys' "Good Vibrations" was played on a specially-adapted turntable running at 1 RPM." If you see a copy, do pick it up because the going rate for it is upwards of $50. A drone like the inside of the hull of an aircraft at 30,000 feet emerges from the 1 RPM side, attacked by distant mortar fire or violins winding up to play - whichever. It's a spectacular concept. The 2 RPM side emits a crisper, clearer scraping, and more ambient atmospheric incidental sound can be heard. It ends with a shaking and a hissing - this is true turntablism, pared down to the essence of its form.

Address: http://www.simplesampling.com/

Karate Timmendorf - We Are Karate Timmendorf (7" by Meeuw Muzak)

Yes, another one of those infectious electronic pop singles. Much head-nodding is to be had with the a-side, and the b-side, "We'll come back as Dali's kung fu flies and than your saxophon metal phantasy frontier break to death!!" presages the latest infatuation with attitude and fringe rockers. This one is like the mange - or the hair of those tousled scuzz brads at Bang! or Make-Up or any of those other ug-wave clubs in Los Angeles that seem to thrive so well these days. On beautiful blood-red vinyl from what I suspect is a GZ plant job for the always-exemplary Meeuw Muzak label. Toy toy toy, yes yes yeah.

Address: laridae@xs4all.nl

A-Trak - Enter Ralph Wiggum / Live @ Tableturns (7" by Stones Throw)

Peanut Butter Wolf produces this particular hole in the wall - a niche in time saving thine, simply because it's a great idea to put out these short samplers of scratch splendor for the folks at home to listen to. A-Trak (Alain Malklovich) does his thang on what is eventually revealed to be a copy of "Take the Money and Run" by the Steve Miller Band (one of the only people who sings exclusively in sharp).

It's like a good break - it's over before you know it and leaves you wanting more. I choo choo choose this!

Address: http://www.stonesthrow.com/

Black Tea - Winners of the World's Worst Rap Competition (7" by Teach Records)

This record leaves me totally speechless. This is the best rap single ever (neck-and-neck with "Da Ha" by The Rappin' Duke). EVER. "No Flow for the Ho's" (with "It Was a Good Day" by Ice Cube as the backing loop) is the Gold Medal Winner, "Tomorrow's Bay-Con" gets the Silver, and "Homocide" gets the Bronze. And the lyrics! Time for the LYRICS!

"It's time

That I talk about the ho's

Over the rap 'cos ho's these days ain't nothin' nice

Remember that phrase? "Nine out of ten get socked in the nose."

That's some true shit.

They only come out for the money

But Black Tea can't be played for no dummy

I'm from the EPA streets - I got much game

To them, it might sound the same.

But if there's a woman that will be there for you and not for the money

Then maybe Black Tea will be there for you

But until then - no flow for the ho's.

Chillin' at a club, watchin' this ho' spread her game to a brother. I see it unfold, 'cos I know the deal. You took her hand, and you are on the way. So she had a friend. With her. She asked if she could come. You didn't want to be rude, so you say, "Okay". To them. To the home movies. And then to a motel. You got butt-naked, and fucked them both. Until you fell asleep The next day you woke up and they were gone. They took your money - you fucking DUMMY! That's why there's no flow for the ho's. I'm out. Peace, dog."

EPA = East Palo Alto. Unfortunately, it's pressed on what I suspect is United Pressing vinyl - the black that's clear enough to see through when it's held up to the light. But I swear to Jesus H. Christwads of Nazarfuck in a handbasket and then some plus more - if you get this, you will wash whatever sins - venal, cardinal, ordinal, I don't care - you might have, straight off your soul.

Best. Rap. Ever.

Address: it is unclear. Sorry.

V/A - Love Comes Shining Over the Mountains (cd by Rune Grammofon)

Packaged in the usual fine inscrutable minimalist package that you can't really pick up because the moire on the sleeve sucks your fingerprints into it, this starts out with the interstellar Kosmische peng of the universe of traffic and syncopation with Information's "Confusion Reigns #1". It's as if various woodland noises have been ground through the mill and have come out in unrecognisable yet intriguing ways. Phonopani's piece floats along, a melody beneath snows and soft burbling. DŸplo's water drips across a keyboard, first in drabs and then a full stream, wending their way through static and back again, shivering from speaker to speaker. The sounds drift languidly past, strangely familiar - dandelion seeds blown into the face of an oncoming winter. A Threatened Logical Unit issues sounds like moles in holes, and the attendant rhythmic pounding on their heads pops up more rhythms, with vague voices scattered through the ether and a paranoid driving style through a dangerous downtown...

Arne Nordheim = blooping tones, a child's garden of musical verse, and then a vast resonant cathedral of sound. Monolight's melody mellows, stumbles and whines; cheepy bird tones and lowing wahs encircling it all and lifting it heavenward. Deathprod summons the wind and the two-tone gorgeous tune in a slight tornado of emotion. Plirk's test tones coalesce into a slow cadence to someplace unknown and unprepared-for, slowing down like a full realisation of what's behind the door... Supersilent's multiple oscillations bring subtlety and unforeseen shadows from the corners of the room, layering percussion tracks and pops over each other until there is something resembling a repeated phrase. Alog brings a sprightly theme for their "Theme from Peeing Toad", all understated drums and watery tones, flowing gradually into the introspective tune that follows. Furuholmen / Bjerkstrand's piece comes and goes, a drowned ghost displaced by the measured clatter of Marhaug / Rishaug. The clatter stutters and shatters, working and sweating out of the right speaker while a buzzing molests speaker left, onto its occasionally chiming demise. Biosphere and Deathprod round out the collection of Norwegian sonic snow with what sounds like backward bells and windchimes set to underload, moving back toward the mountains, unclear if it's ever to return...

Address: http://www.runegrammofon.com/

Jazzkammer - Timex (cd by Rune Grammofon)

Crackling like electrified air and storms is what happens next. The end of vinyl? The world? Like the naked man cooking bacon, it surges forth, grumbling and grunting slightly. And then, as an airplane at 40,000 feet, the sound mutes, and occasional scratching can be heard trying to rip apart various areas of your speaker cones. It's a surprisingly gentle series of sounds that threatens to destroy your hi-fi at any moment lest you step up the volume a bit. The crackles and hisses comes in steady waves, crashing on the shore of peripheral consciousness and eddying a bit before turning into waves of mercury, or liquid helium.

It's difficult to tell which of the pieces are acoustical samples of sound events, or manipulated samples. Testament to zeroes and ones, actually. The squeal of metal and wheels zips itself down into the action, as if the contact microphone has become entangled in a gurney trundling down the corridors of a hospital proper. A midi tune - from an Asian film - and sounds sweep past in fast-motion, through some creaking and ambient room-sounds, into "Bacteria Less Thermo", a decidedly louder bit that echoes what seems like gong resonantion but likely isn't. An incredibly high-pitched tone - go ahead, move your head, it changes as you do - follows, increasing in pitch and it's faintly like a tractor-trailer truck, the way the pitch changes so often. Third gear, it's all right...fourth gear, it's all right...twenty-fourth gear, it's all right... The metallic banging and feedbacked ice fog of "Happy New Year" end the album - and, like the appropriate firecrackers on the record, as I type this, I hear fireworks outside my house (simply because the Los Angeles Lakers have won a third championship, making it a "three-peat") - but, with high-pitched sound, we know that it's not truly over...until...it's....over.

Address: http://www.runegrammofon.com/

1348 - Crystal Night (cdR by Korm Plastics)

Wow. This is a surprisingly beautiful sound transfer from the old cassette (issued in an edition of 1x3x4x8). A found record (vaguely French romantic lurve instrumental) melds with a repetitive deep drone and primitive percussion to reveal implications behind the initial sounds: ug-like brutality buried beneath a thin patina of romance and civilisation. And yet there is grace to this brutality, which evolves like an uncoiling snake, dissolving into the terrors of the incessant bell and the yanked brake of the wheels of progress.

Arclit swathes of sound jump from the speakers, until the river of the underlying current passes them by. There's "Silence", and then a sampled deconstruction of Edgard Varese's "Poeme Electronique". It's rattly and mechanical and vaguely reminiscent of the Jean Tinguely machine artwork at the Tate Modern in London which is turned on every hour - chains lift, winches turn, and curiosity blossoms. The instrumental coda "Unknown" is a few simple synth melodies tied together, displaying a cinematic feel.

By turns it is discomfiting, unnerving, disjointed and confrontational - and, as it often happens with these sorts of things, it has "slipped through the cracks", as it were...

Address: http://www.staalplaat.com/

Strotter Inst. - Eine Bauer im Anzug Dokumentation (cdR by Hess)

Hoo-ya! Nicely-packaged cdRs rock hard. This one has a photo of Christoph Hess and his turntables and machines, and it's included with a graceful piece of some sort of vellum with the track listing on it. It's turntablism via manipulated records on old Lenco record players. The repetition of the sounds is reminiscent of the John Cage dictum that, if something's "boring", try it again, then twice again, then four times, and so on - well, that and the murder by incessantly tolling bell in Sax Rohmer's "Fu Manchu" books. The way that the other sounds is rather like an orchestral piece - instruments falling away, then adding themselves to the overall piece at hand. The sounds? A sprawling collection of thumps and thrumming, repeating yet changing as the seconds tick by on the disc player. It's as if the turntable itself were played as a drum underwater, at turns. The first three tracks are live actions, and the fourth and fifth tracks are what would seem to be archival material (the final one - from something on Prion Tapes? - is repeated dialogue intercut with brass band recordings). This is one of those things that you pick up for the first time and think, "Hoo-ya!", and then realise the artist has been around since the Ice Age or some other such.

It's all incredibly atmospheric (cf. "Vergessen") and gets the usual "Hey, now!" from this part of the world.

Address: chess@solnet.ch

Davey Williams - Firing Up the Old Sikorsky / Requiem For Bosnia (7" by Table of the Elements)

Remember the good ol' days, when these 7"s from Table of the Elements came out and they were these beautifully simple packages of coloured vinyl and interesting sounds and they seemed like one kind of second coming? Well, I do - you keep quiet, there's no need to be mean. This is one of the first ones I picked up - the "Carbon" 7" - and the a-side is just Mr. Williams with his guitar and electric screwdriver, making a fine literalist statement and moving the Sikorsky into a fine video-game / driving anthem that still gives chills ten years after. "Requiem For Bosnia" hangs low, a smile in chilled air, as a tone reminiscent of "Armenia" suffuses the background.

Ah, but then people started calling them "Label of the Arrogance" and no one would return correspondence. Them was the days...